Disqus - Latest Comments for Dan Lester

Re: Facebook Removes Friend Timeline

Dan Lester — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 20:29:16 -0000

I wonder if they've demoted Gifts explicitly to 'level the playing field' between Facebook-owned and third-party apps? It was a bit 'unfair' that Gifts used to appear on the right-hand side when third-party apps can't make any use of that space.

Re: Facebook Calls it Quits on Java

Dan Lester — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:22:13 -0000

Actually, the 'official' Java library has been out-of-date for some time.

There's been an open source alternative that volunteers have maintained instead:

http://code.google.com/p/facebook-java-api/

Effectively, the open source version has been the one to use for some time, so this doesn't really change much.

Clearly, Facebook is aware of this and that's why they've stopped linking their own out-of-date version. Why they haven't explained the alternative is anyone's guess. They do like to keep their distance from the community... couldn't be seen to know about individual developers' efforts!

Re: 2007/11/16/opensocket/

Dan Lester — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 11:41:55 -0000

Glad you find OpenSocket interesting. It's only really an academic exercise right now, and we're perfectly happy to respond to any concerns from Facebook or Google. For that reason, we have not released the source code for the time being.

If it's designed to 'say' anything to the big boys, it's only that the possibilities of techology will prevail in the end...! I'm sure all players are smart enough not to try to restrict their technology artificially for commercial reasons.

Our main driver at the moment is in ensuring the success of more generic open source projects. It is important that containers and apps are built consistently going forward. More details of these projects (under Apache most likely) will emerge soon!

Re: Hi5 implements open social platform

Dan Lester — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:36:26 -0000

Just one point: MySpace's platform is actually an Open Social platform.

It has some extensions for a small number of MySpace-specific items. That's the way Open Social was designed - to be extended, in a conforming way, beyond its core when a container site has differences from all the rest.

Another difference on MySpace is that developers need to copy and paste code directly into the site. Ning, Hi5, and Orkut all just take a URL to your gadget spec. That's not a fundamental difference in the API, though.